I agree with your concerns about self-ballasted MV bulbs. I think the dragons respond well to them but I did not like the fact they burned out so often and that you can not use any sort of temperature controller on them without shortening their life even further. And then there are the safety concerns.



I would not worry about using the flourescent UV lamps. Provide plenty of rocks/perches and your dragon(s) will be able to get within 6" of them often enough.



One problem you'll have with an aluminum dome is that it will take up an awful lot of space. To provide a false ceiling area that will hold it means having an upper and lower lip on your cage that will be pretty large. This does not look very good unless you make your cage very tall. But if you make your cage tall you end up not providing as many opportunities for the animal to get close to light/heat sources and have to use more energy to heat the cage.



Oh yeah. To further confuse things the upper and lower lips should be about the same size for aesthetic reasons. If you build a low hanging upper lip you'll end up with a very tall lower lip. Then you'll need to raise the floor a bunch so you can see the dragon. This is what I did with my cage. I raised it with high density styrene foam and then covered that with vinyl flooring.



What I'm getting at is that you should consider heat/light sources that don't take up a lot of vertical space.



Have you considered a radiant heat panel? Or you could go with a halogen mounted horizontally. You would not be able to use a flood bulb unless it was mounted vertically. But then that gets back to taking up a lot of space.

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